[cero_z]

Hi KRANTZ,

Your post makes some good points about why open-raising is preferable to open-limping on many occasions, but virtually everyone agrees that it is. As for your assertion that open-limping is always worse, and the evidence you provide, I strongly disagree.

As iceman pointed out, the reasoning behind points 1) and 2) is flawed. There's nothing inherent to open-limping that means you can't win a big pot or lose a small pot with an excellent hand. Your example of limping in with Q3s and getting stacked by K5s when you both flush is obviously bad; change your opponent's hand to J5s and you'll be winning a big pot as often as you lose one. Also, there's no reason that open-raising prevents someone from calling you with higher cards suited in your suit. Raising makes it more likely that you'll PLAY a big pot, for better or for worse; that's all it does, in regards to pot size.

Furthermore, your assertion that open-raising "creates +EV situations where none existed before," is arbitrary. It's easy to imagine scenarios where the reverse is true. Here's one that comes up occassionally in various forms:

You have a very aggressive player on your left. He is constantly overplaying his "made" hands (like any pair) post-flop, and also frequently makes big bluffs with air post-flop. Additionally, when you open-limp, he almost always raises to 7 or 8 BBs. When you open-raise to 3-4BBs, he almost always reraises to 5x your opening bet. With 100BB effective stacks, you pick up 22 in LP. You can either raise, and play a pot with 12%-20% of your stack in pre-flop, or limp, and play the pot with 8% in pre-flop. While you can debate whether it's +EV, neutral, or -EV to play the hand in a raised pot (I'd argue that it's slightly negative if you play very well post-flop), it can't be as +EV as the clearly profitable play of limping.

You may feel that this example is contrived; I concede that it only comes up once in a while. A much more common spot that comes up when playing live is that you have the same hand (22), and see that a very predictable player on your left has picked up a "big hand" pre-flop. You know he will raise if you limp, and reraise if you raise. Limping is better unless the stacks are very deep.

There are plenty of other examples I can think of off the top of my head. The point is not that raising isn't usually the best option; I agree that it is. My point is that thinking along the lines of, "Never do x because x is always inferior," speaks to a weakness that permeates the online game, and these forums. It's the weakness of playing a system rigidly. Creating a very complicated, very solid basic strategy and then applying it rigidly is an approach that undoubtedly will win a lot of money in the mid-stakes games. But, you won't dominate those games, or beat the toughest games, until your strategy is dynamic, adapting to changing conditions as they arise. A player in the 2 examples above, playing a rigid basic strategy of open-raising or folding, would likely fold the deuces, and would still be playing a profitable game over the maniac on his left. But, he'd make more in that spot if he adjusted his strategy to account for the unusual conditions.